Betty eagerly. "It's
because all college girls are alike. Miss Ferris said so once. She said
if you waited long enough each girl you had known and liked would come
back in the person of some younger one. But I never really believed it
until to-day." And Betty related the story of her successful hunt for
the freshman who was like herself.

Everybody laughed.

"But then," asserted Babbie loyally, "she's not so nice as you, Betty.
She couldn't be. And I don't believe there are freshmen like all of us."

"Not in this one class," said Rachel. "But it's a nice idea, isn't it?
When our little sisters or our daughters come to Harding they can have
friends just as dear and jolly as the ones we have had."

"And they will be just as likely to be locked out if they linger on
their own or their friends' door-steps after ten," added Madeline
pompously, whereat Eleanor, Katherine, Rachel and the B's rushed for
their respective abiding places, and the Belden House contingent marched
up-stairs singing

"Back to the college again,"

a parody of one of Kipling's "Barrack-Room Ballads" which Madeline
Ayres had written one morning during a philosophy lecture that bored
her, and which the whole college was singing a week later.

CHAPTER II

A SENIOR CLASS-MEETING

It was great fun exercising all the new senior privileges. One of the
first and most exciting was occupying the front seats at morning chapel.

"Although," complained Betty Wales sadly, "you don't get much good out
of that, if your name begins with a W. Of course I am glad there are so
many of 19--, but they do take up a lot of room. Nobody could tell that
Eleanor and I were seniors, unless they knew it beforehand."

"And then they wouldn't believe it about you," retorted Madeline, the
tease.

Madeline, being an A, was one of the favored front row, who were near
enough "to catch Prexy's littlest smiles," as Helen Adams put it, and
who were the observed of all observers as they marched, two and two,
down the middle aisle, just behind the faculty. Madeline, being tall and
graceful and always perfectly self-possessed, looked very impressive,
but little Helen Adams was dreadfully frightened and blushed to the
roots of her smooth brown hair every morning.

"And yet I wouldn't give it up for anything," she confided to Betty. "I
mean--I'll exchange with you any time, but I do just love to sit there,
although I dread walking out so. It's just the same when I am